As he moves to reopen the state Friday amid the coronavirus pandemic, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has cited data and science as his guiding lights.
But Texas has yet to meet most of the benchmarks for easing restrictions set by Abbott’s most prominent outside medical adviser.
The governor is using a phased re-entry plan that seeks to balance a need to restart the economy while also preventing a second wave of the outbreak. On Monday he told Texans: “Because of your efforts, the COVID-19 infection rate has been on the decline over the past 17 days.”
While the rate of positive tests is indeed declining, the state doesn’t know the true infection rate — how many people have been infected out of all those at risk of exposure — because it has only tested about 1 percent of the population since the outbreak began.
There are still a lot of indicators the state can track. For help, Abbott has turned to medical advisers including Dr. Mark McClellan, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President George W. Bush.
McClellan — the son of former Texas comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn — directs the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University and co-authored a paper last month that laid out four prerequisites for states to meet as they reopen their economies. It has helped inform the Trump administration’s guidelines for states as the pandemic plays out.
In an interview, McClellan said Texas took effective early steps to avoid the overwhelming outbreaks that have hit New York and other states.
He also acknowledged that Texas has not met all the benchmarks he and his colleagues envisioned, and said the state will have to work hard in the coming days to boost testing and train people to track down the contacts of those infected, to slow the spread of the virus.
Here are the four goals McClellan helped outline, and where Texas stands on each.
Short answer: Of the four benchmarks, we’re missing three of them. The number of new cases is not actually declining, and hasn’t come anywhere close to declining for 14 straight days. We have less than half of the daily testing capacity Abbott required, and we have less than half of the number of contact tracers he wanted. The one metric we are meeting is on hospital capacity, and if we’re not careful or unlucky, that could get away from us as well. But hey, other than that, everything is just ducky.
I believe the interview with Dr. McClellan that the story references is this one in Texas Monthly with RG Ratcliffe. I mean look, I’m going stir-crazy too, and I want very much for our hurting businesses to get back to something sustainable for them. None of this is easy. I very much hope this will work out great and we all look back on this point in time as when the tide turned in our favor. But all that is is hope. There’s no data behind it, and no reason to believe it will go that well. And as bad as things are now for businesses, having the infection rate spike will not do anything good for them, or anyone else. I will be delighted to be proven to be a worrywart. We all better pray that I am.